Rabah Ossidhoum, the Algerian antifascist who fell in Spain in 1938

On May 27, 1938, Rabah Ossidhoum, Algerian worker and communist militant, fell into battle in Miraflores, in Aragon. At 35, he then commanded the Paris Common BattalionUnit of international brigades made up of French, Belgian, British and American. Son of a blacksmith, Ossidhoum had known misery and racism in Algeria before going into exile in France, where he worked at Renault and adhera to the French Communist Party, seduced by his anti -colonial commitment.

With the socialist Mohand Amokrane Belaïdi and the anarchist Mohamed Saïl, he was one of the 500 to 800 Algerians engaged alongside the Spanish Republicans. For these men, fighting Franco returned to strike the imperialism that oppressed their peoples. As Syrian Communist Khaled Bakdash pointed out, they intended to “wash the honor” of the Arab world, tainted by the forced enrollment of Moroccan soldiers in the Franco army.

The book Moros Contra Franco (Marc Almodóvar and Andreu Rosés, 2025) explores this unknown episode. These brigadists – mainly Algerians, but also Palestinians or Syrians – embodied an urbanized and politicized Arab world, where workers and intellectuals, Muslims, Jews and Christians, saw in communism a tool for liberation. The journey of the Palestinian Muhammad Najati Sidqi testifies to this: sent to raise Moroccan troops against Franco, he failed, braked by the anti -colonial moderation of the Republicans, anxious not to provoke Paris. Despite their small number in the face of the 80,000 Moroccan auxilions of Franco, these men revealed a common aspiration: an anti -fascism and decolonial struggle. An erased heritage, which history finally begins to rediscover.